Wonders & Marvels

History and science, checked against the sources.

The Roman Sponge on a Stick: Toilet Hygiene and an Unsettled Question

Romans built multi-seat latrines with running water, and a sponge on a stick turns up in their texts. Whether it wiped bodies or scrubbed toilets is still debated.

By · Published · 9 min read

Walk into the ruins of a large Roman public latrine and the arrangement is hard to misread: a long stone bench pierced by a row of openings, a channel beneath it, and a narrow gutter at the users’ feet. What is much harder to read is the small object that modern reconstructions often prop against that bench, a sea sponge fixed to a wooden handle. Popular histories usually call it Roman toilet paper. The ancient evidence for that is thinner than the confident retellings suggest, and specialists disagree about what the thing was for.

A seat among strangers

Multi-seat latrines are among the most recognizable features of Roman towns, especially near baths. At Ephesus, the archaeologist Gilbert Wiplinger describes public latrines attached to bath-gymnasium complexes that could be entered both from the baths and from the street, so that shopkeepers and passers-by used them too. The largest had up to 60 seats ranged around an open courtyard, with the benches set over a large channel and a gutter on the floor in front of them, where water ran constantly for cleaning. In the latrine of the Vedius Gymnasium, six inscriptions reserved particular seats for occupational groups, chiefly merchants.1

Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow of Brandeis University, author of a 2015 book on sanitation in Roman Italy,2 cautions against the bright, airy image such ruins give today. Most public toilets, she writes, were small, dark and dirty, and anyone who could wait until reaching home probably did. She mentions an Ostia latrine that could take more than 20 users at once, with a fountain basin for washing up.3 The apparent lack of privacy may also mislead. As Duncan Keenan-Jones summarizes her book, she points to the concealing effect of Roman clothing, to the lack of lighting, and to the holes for the sponge stick as features that gave users more screening than a modern visitor would assume.4

Where the water went

Romans moved enormous volumes of water, and some of it ended up flushing waste. An imperial ordinance quoted by Frontinus, the water commissioner of Rome around the end of the first century, restricted private use of overflow water from the reservoirs, because some overflow was needed, in the words of the Loeb translation, “not only for the health of our City, but also for use in the flushing of the sewers.”5

That does not mean Roman sewers were a modern sanitation system. Koloski-Ostrow argues that Rome’s great Cloaca Maxima existed chiefly to drain standing water and floodwater, and that what it carried went back into the Tiber. At Pompeii and Herculaneum almost no toilets were connected to the street sewers. Most houses had a one-seat toilet over a cesspit, often in the kitchen, and the collected waste was sold to farmers or spread on gardens. One Herculaneum sewer still held a hardened deposit of sludge about 1.35 meters deep when it was first excavated.3 In Keenan-Jones’s summary, her book concludes that Roman sewers were conceived more as stormwater drains than as instruments of hygiene, and that she found no evidence that toilets multiplied because of health concerns.4

The sponge in the texts

Only a few ancient passages mention a sponge on a stick, and each is oblique.

The most famous is in Seneca’s seventieth letter to Lucilius. Seneca tells of a German in a training school for beast fighters who, before the morning shows, went off to relieve himself, the one thing he was allowed to do without a guard. There he took the stick that was kept for cleaning, with a sponge attached, and forced it down his throat until he suffocated. The Latin calls it “lignum id quod ad emundanda obscena adhaerente spongia positum est.”6 Richard Gummere’s Loeb translation renders the object as “the stick of wood, tipped with a sponge, which was devoted to the vilest uses.”7 Seneca’s point is philosophical (the will can always find a way to die), and he concludes that “the foulest death is preferable to the fairest slavery.”7

Seneca never says whose or what was being cleaned. The neuter plural obscena can mean the private parts, but the Lewis and Short Latin dictionary gives “the excrements” as its sense in this very passage.8 Read that way, the sentence describes a stick for cleaning away filth, which leaves open whether the filth was on a body or on a latrine.

The Greek-derived name for the implement, xylospongium (“wood-sponge”), turns up in a papyrus letter. Claudius Terentianus, a sailor in the Alexandrian fleet and later a legionary, wrote to Claudius Tiberianus, whom he addresses as father, early in the second century; his archive was found at Karanis in Egypt in 1928-29. Complaining of a man who would not help him, he writes, in the standard edition, “non magis qurauit me pro xylesphongium”: roughly, he cared no more for me than for a sponge stick. Herman Seldeslachts, who explains the spelling xylesphongium as a colloquial alteration of xylospongium, translates the object into French as “une éponge de latrines,” a latrine sponge.9 The insult works only if the reader knows the thing as something lowly and toilet-bound. It says nothing about technique.

Martial mocks a host’s lavish dinner by noting that by tomorrow it will be nothing, a thing known only to “infelix damnatae spongia virgae” (the luckless sponge of the condemned stick) or to a dog or a roadside pot.10 Again, the sponge is associated with the latrine, not described in use. Martial also shows how ordinary sponges were: another of his epigrams presents a sponge for wiping tables.10

A painting at Ostia adds a joke. In the so-called Baths of the Seven Sages, Hadrianic or early Antonine paintings show Greek sages above crude Latin advice on bowel movements, with a row of men who seem to sit on a communal latrine. One partly preserved line has been read “(u)taris xylosphongio,” translated on the Ostia Antica research website as “No one gives you a long lecture, Priscianus, as long as you use the sponge on a stick.” The room may originally have been a bar rather than a latrine.11

Wiping or scrubbing?

In much modern writing the reading has been straightforward: the sponge was for wiping oneself, and in a public latrine it was rinsed in the running gutter and reused. Koloski-Ostrow put it that way in a 2015 essay, writing that “the Roman version of toilet paper in many cases was a communal sponge on a stick.”3 Piers Mitchell’s survey of Roman parasites likewise lists personal hygiene with a sponge on a stick among the Roman sanitary practices credited in the literature.12 Note the inference built into that view: no ancient source says that one sponge served every user of a public latrine. The communal sponge is a deduction from the setting.

The dissent has come mainly from Gilbert Wiplinger, who published a paper in 2012 whose title translates as “The use of the xylospongium: a new theory on hygienic conditions in Roman latrines.”13 His paper was not available to us. As a popular account summarizes it, Wiplinger argues that the texts, including Seneca and Martial, never clearly describe the sponge being applied to the body, and that a toilet brush for cleaning the latrine is the more plausible use.14 National Geographic, reporting the same disagreement in 2020, concluded that archaeologists had “yet to settle the sponge-on-stick debate.”15

Koloski-Ostrow’s own view appears to have moved. In a 2024 volume on the toilets and urinals of Rome, which she edited with Gemma Jansen and Richard Neudecker, her essay on health and hygiene, according to the reviewer John R. Clarke, “casts doubt on one of the universally cited tropes of Roman toilet hygiene, the use of a sponge on a stick to clean one’s bottom” (pages 195 to 197).16 We have not read that essay, so the details of her case are not reported here. Not everyone has moved with her. In the same volume, Clarke reports, Gemma Jansen argues from the keyhole shape of Roman toilet seats that users cleaned themselves from the front with water scooped from the gutter, “and only perhaps with the sponge on the stick, pace Koloski-Ostrow.”16 And Herman Seldeslachts records, as a privately communicated opinion, the archaeologist G. E. Thüry’s judgment that Wiplinger’s thesis is contradicted by philological and above all archaeological evidence.9

Neither side has a decisive text. Seneca’s phrase fits either reading. Terentianus and Martial show only that the object belonged to the latrine and was a byword for something base. No sponge on a stick has survived archaeologically to settle the matter. It is also possible that the same kind of implement served different purposes in different places, or both purposes at once.

Shards and other options

Sponges were not the only possibility. Philippe Charlier and colleagues, writing in the BMJ in 2012, collected evidence for pessoi, small rounded pieces of stone or broken pottery, as wiping tools in the Greek world.17 As JSTOR Daily summarizes their article, pessoi from the Athenian agora had been re-cut to smooth their edges, a sixth-century BCE drinking cup shows a squatting man using one, and two pessoi from latrine fills carried mineralized excrement on their edges. JSTOR Daily also reports, citing Charlier and colleagues, the speculative suggestion by some scholars that ostraka, the sherds Athenians inscribed with the names of men they wanted exiled, might have ended up used this way, and notes that long use of such abrasive objects could cause irritation or aggravate hemorrhoids.18 National Geographic illustrates pessoi said to come from Roman latrines in Sicily and Crete.15

Clean-looking, not clean

Whatever the sponge was for, the larger question is whether Roman sanitation made people healthier. Palaeoparasitology, the study of parasite eggs preserved in latrine soil, coprolites and burials, suggests not much. Mitchell’s 2017 review in Parasitology found whipworm and roundworm widespread across Roman sites, along with the dysentery-causing amoeba Entamoeba histolytica, despite multi-seat latrines, sewers and piped water. In his words, “This would suggest that the public sanitation measures were insufficient to protect the population from parasites spread by fecal contamination.”12

Mitchell counts 12 species of endoparasite (intestinal worms and protozoa, along with liver flukes) and 5 of external parasite from Roman-period sites. He offers explanations as possibilities, not findings: warm bath water that was changed only now and then, and the practice of spreading human feces from towns on crops. Fish tapeworm, he notes, appears more widely than in Bronze and Iron Age Europe, and he suggests uncooked fermented fish sauce, garum, as one route. Fine-toothed combs used against head lice have been excavated in Roman-period Judea.12 Reviewing the newer Rome volume, Clarke reports Koloski-Ostrow’s similar conclusion that public toilets made the city cleaner without eliminating major health problems.16

What can be said

Romans built latrines that were social, often busy, frequently grim, and sometimes connected to impressive systems of running water. A sponge on a stick belonged in those spaces; three writers and one painted wall take that for granted. Whether Romans wiped themselves with it, scrubbed the seats with it, or did both is not established. The common claim that every visitor to a public latrine shared one sponge is a reasonable guess that no ancient source states. The parasites in Roman latrine soil are better evidence of daily hygiene than any single tool, and they suggest that Roman toilets did less for public health than their stonework implies.

Footnotes

  1. Wiplinger 2004, pp. 73-74. ↩

  2. Koloski-Ostrow 2015 (catalog record). ↩

  3. Koloski-Ostrow, The Conversation, 19 November 2015. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. Keenan-Jones, AJA 122.1 (2018). ↩ ↩2

  5. Frontinus, De aquis 2.111, trans. Bennett. ↩

  6. Seneca, Ep. 70.20, Latin text. ↩

  7. Seneca, Ep. 70.20-21, trans. Gummere. ↩ ↩2

  8. Lewis and Short, s.v. obscenus, II.A. ↩

  9. Seldeslachts 2021, pp. 301-305, line 29 at p. 308, and p. 320 n. 82. ↩ ↩2

  10. Martial 12.48.5-8 and 14.144. ↩ ↩2

  11. Ostia Antica, “Terme dei Sette Sapienti,” room 5. ↩

  12. Mitchell 2017, abstract, introduction, discussion and conclusion. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  13. Wiplinger 2012, pp. 295-304 (bibliographic record). ↩

  14. History Facts, “Roman Toilet Paper: The Tersorium.” ↩

  15. Blakemore, National Geographic, 2020. ↩ ↩2

  16. Clarke, BMCR 2026.02.28. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  17. Charlier et al. 2012 (bibliographic record). ↩

  18. Silver, JSTOR Daily, 2020. ↩

Sources

  1. Seneca. Epistulae morales ad Lucilium 70.20 (Latin text). The Latin Library. www.thelatinlibrary.com/sen/seneca.ep8.shtml Used for: Latin of Ep. 70.20: 'Nuper in ludo bestiariorum unus e Germanis ... secessit ad exonerandum corpus ... ibi lignum id quod ad emundanda obscena adhaerente spongia positum est totum in gulam farsit'.
  2. Seneca. Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 70, trans. R. M. Gummere (Loeb Classical Library, 1917-1925). Wikisource. en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Letter_70 Used for: Gummere's English of 70.20-21: the German in a training school for wild-beast fighters withdrew to relieve himself, the only thing he could do without a guard; 'the stick of wood, tipped with a sponge, which was devoted to the vilest uses'; choked himself; 'the foulest death is preferable to the fairest slavery'.
  3. Lewis, C. T., and Short, C. (1879). A Latin Dictionary, s.v. obscenus. Online at alatius.com. alatius.com/ls/index.php?ord=obscenus Used for: obscena as a noun: 'the excrements', citing Seneca Ep. 70.20 (as 8, 1, 20); also 'the private parts' in other authors.
  4. Seldeslachts, H. (2021). De xylesphongio et quibusdam aliis rebus: quelques notes a propos d'une lettre de Claudius Terentianus (P.Mich. VIII 471). Les Etudes Classiques, 89, 301-334. pure.unamur.be/ws/files/73301097/Seldeslachts_De_xylesphongio_et_quibusdam_aliis Used for: Archive of Claudius Terentianus found at Karanis in 1928-29; soldier of the Alexandrian fleet, later legionary; letters of the first quarter of the second century; P.Mich. VIII 471 addressed to Claudius Tiberianus; text of line 29 'non magis qurauit me pro xylesphongium' (Cugusi's edition) with French translation 'une eponge de latrines'; xylesphongium explained as an altered spelling of xylosp(h)ongium. Read pp. 301-309 (the repository file is a 10-page excerpt).
  5. Martial. Epigrams 12.48 and 14.144 (Latin text). The Latin Library. www.thelatinlibrary.com/martial/mart12.shtml Used for: 12.48.5-8: a lavish dinner will tomorrow be nothing, 'Quod sciat infelix damnatae spongia virgae / Vel quicumque canis iunctaque testa viae'; 14.144: 'Haec tibi sorte datur tergendis spongia mensis' (a sponge for wiping tables).
  6. Bakker, J. T. (ed.). Regio III, Insula X: Terme dei Sette Sapienti (III,X,2) (Baths of the Seven Sages). Ostia: Harbour City of Ancient Rome (ostia-antica.org), page dated 14 March 2023. www.ostia-antica.org/regio3/10/10-2.htm Used for: Room 5 paintings of the Seven Sages, Hadrianic or early Antonine; Latin texts on bodily functions; inscription read '(u)TARIS XYLOSPHONGIO' translated 'No one gives you a long lecture, Priscianus, as long as you use the sponge on a stick'; seated men probably on a communal latrine; room probably originally a bar.
  7. Koloski-Ostrow, A. O. (2015, November 19). Talking heads: what toilets and sewers tell us about ancient Roman sanitation. The Conversation. theconversation.com/talking-heads-what-toilets-and-sewers-tell-us-about-ancient- Used for: Cloaca Maxima mainly for drainage; Herculaneum sewer sludge deposit about 1.35 m; Pompeii toilets almost all unconnected to sewers; cesspit toilets often in kitchens; collected waste sold as fertilizer; public multi-seaters usually connected to sewers; most public toilets dark, dank and dirty; an Ostia toilet for more than 20 users; clothing gave screening; 'the Roman version of toilet paper in many cases was a communal sponge on a stick'; gas flames, rats, demons; Fortuna in toilets.
  8. Koloski-Ostrow, A. O. (2015). The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy: Toilets, Sewers, and Water Systems. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 9781469621296. muse.jhu.edu/book/39473 Used for: Bibliographic details and chapter list (Project MUSE record).
  9. Keenan-Jones, D. (2018). Review of A. O. Koloski-Ostrow, The Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy. American Journal of Archaeology, 122(1). DOI: 10.3764/ajaonline1221.keenan-jones. ajaonline.org/book-review/3598/ Used for: Summary of the book: privacy in communal toilets supported by concealing clothing, holes for the sponge stick, and lack of lighting; no evidence toilets spread for health reasons; latrines insufficient to prevent intestinal parasites (citing Mitchell); cloacae seen as stormwater drains.
  10. Clarke, J. R. (2026). Review of G. C. M. Jansen, A. O. Koloski-Ostrow, and R. Neudecker, Sixty-six toilets and urinals in the ancient city of Rome: sanitary, urbanistic, and social agency (Leuven: Peeters, 2024). Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2026.02.28. ISBN 9789042953376. bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2026/2026.02.28/ Used for: Koloski-Ostrow's essay 'Rome, caput mundi: Health, hygiene, and sanitation' 'casts doubt on one of the universally cited tropes of Roman toilet hygiene, the use of a sponge on a stick to clean one's bottom (195-97)'; public toilets made Rome cleaner but did not remove major health problems; parasite research.
  11. Wiplinger, G. (2012). Der Gebrauch des Xylospongiums: eine neue Theorie zu den hygienischen Verhaeltnissen in roemischen Latrinen. In R. Kreiner and W. Letzner (eds.), SPA. Sanitas per aquam: Tagungsband des Internationalen Frontinus-Symposiums, Aachen, 18.-22. Maerz 2009 (BABESCH Supplement 21), pp. 295-304. Leuven: Peeters. ISBN 9789042926615. openlibrary.org/books/OL30721473M Used for: Existence, title, and bibliographic details of the volume (Open Library record); the paper's title and page range as reported in search results and reference lists.
  12. History Facts (2026, June 4). Roman Toilet Paper: The Tersorium. historyfacts.com (unsigned). historyfacts.com/world-history/article/ancient-romans-toilet-paper/ Used for: Popular summary of Wiplinger's view: the tersorium was more plausibly a toilet brush; reviewing texts including Seneca and Martial, he finds none clearly describing use for personal hygiene.
  13. Wiplinger, G. (2004). Die Kanaele von Ephesos. In H. Krejci (ed.), Expedition in die Kulturgeschichte des Abwassers (Vienna: Stadt Wien/MA 30, Wien Kanal), pp. 73-86. Digitized by Wienbibliothek im Rathaus. ISBN 320000214X. digital.wienbibliothek.at/download/pdf/1440044.pdf Used for: Ephesus public latrines attached to baths and gymnasia, usable from the baths and from the street; six inscriptions in the Vedius Gymnasium latrine reserving seats for occupational groups; large latrines of up to 60 seats around open courtyards; benches over a large channel, with a gutter in front where water flowed constantly for cleaning.
  14. Frontinus. De aquis 2.110-111, trans. C. E. Bennett (Loeb Classical Library, 1925). LacusCurtius. penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Frontinus/De_Aquis/Bennett/2*.html Used for: Imperial ordinance on 'lapsed' (overflow) water: some overflow is proper 'not only for the health of our City, but also for use in the flushing of the sewers'.
  15. Charlier, P., Brun, L., Pretre, C., and Huynh-Charlier, I. (2012). Toilet hygiene in the classical era. BMJ, 345, e8287. DOI: 10.1136/bmj.e8287. doi.org/10.1136/bmj.e8287 Used for: Existence, authors, and bibliographic details (Crossref and PubMed records). Content reported via s16 and s17.
  16. Silver, C. (2020, July 24). This Is How They Wiped Themselves in Ancient Rome. JSTOR Daily. daily.jstor.org/this-is-how-they-wiped-themselves-in-ancient-rome/ Used for: Summary of Charlier et al.: pessoi as ceramic fragments; Athenian agora pessoi re-cut to smooth edges; a sixth-century BCE kylix showing a man wiping with a pessos; suggestion that ostraka with enemies' names were used; two pessoi from latrine fill with mineralized excrement on their edges; possible irritation and hemorrhoid complications.
  17. Blakemore, E. (2020, March 31). What did people do before toilet paper? National Geographic. www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/what-people-do-before-toilet-paper Used for: Archaeologists unsure whether the tersorium cleaned the user or the facility; 'Archaeologists have yet to settle the sponge-on-stick debate'; photo caption: pessoi excavated from Roman latrines in Sicily and Crete (photograph credited to Charlier et al.).
  18. Mitchell, P. D. (2017). Human parasites in the Roman World: health consequences of conquering an empire. Parasitology, 144(1), 48-58. Published online 2016. DOI: 10.1017/S0031182015001651. doi.org/10.1017/S0031182015001651 Used for: Whipworm, roundworm and Entamoeba histolytica widespread despite latrines, sewers and piped water; abstract sentence on insufficiency of sanitation; 12 endoparasite and 5 ectoparasite species; hypotheses of dirty bath water and fertilizing with human feces; fish tapeworm more widespread than in Bronze and Iron Age Europe and possible link to garum; delousing combs.

What the evidence does not settle

Points where sources disagree, or that we could not confirm. We list them rather than smooth them over.

  • Gilbert Wiplinger's 2012 paper (Der Gebrauch des Xylospongiums) could not be obtained. Its existence, title, volume and page range are confirmed from catalog records. The summary of his argument (that the implement was a toilet brush for cleaning the latrine, and that the ancient texts do not clearly describe it being used on the body) rests on a popular, unsigned History Facts article, so the article presents it in general terms only.
  • Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow's 2024 essay in Sixty-six toilets and urinals in the ancient city of Rome (pp. 195-97 on the sponge stick) was not read. Her position there is reported only as John R. Clarke's BMCR review summarizes it. Her 2015 book was also not read directly; the article relies on her 2015 essay in The Conversation and on Duncan Keenan-Jones's AJA review of the book.
  • The Charlier et al. BMJ article (2012) could not be read: the publisher site blocked access and PubMed has no abstract. Its findings on pessoi are reported as summarized in JSTOR Daily and National Geographic, and no words are quoted from it.
  • Whether the sponge stick was shared by all users of a public latrine is an inference from the setting, not something any ancient text states. The article says so.
  • The English rendering of Martial 12.48.7 and of the Terentianus phrase are our own working translations, given as approximations, apart from the French rendering of the latter credited to Seldeslachts.
  • A Wikipedia citation that the Ostia inscription is published as L'Annee epigraphique 1941, 5 was not checked; the article relies on the ostia-antica.org transcription.

Corrections and updates

No corrections have been issued for this article.

Spotted an error? Email editor@wondersandmarvels.com with the passage and a source. See our corrections policy.

About this article: written for the new Wonders & Marvels by the Wonders & Marvels Research Desk, with AI-assisted research and drafting. It is an original work and does not reproduce any article previously published at this address.